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Development Darwinism

Benjamin Taylor gives 11 game post mortems from a decade of rapid prototyping experience. Presented initially at IGDA's Boston Post Mortem in Cambridge, MA on Wed, Jan 15th, 2014. - “Don’t be afraid to fail”, “find new friends”, “learn something new”, you’ve heard all the reasons why participating in a jam is the right thing to do, but let’s face it, you came in wanting to succeed at making a game. This is your chance to learn from a pro how to do things right and make your jam experience a crowning success, regardless of role and experience. Ben Taylor (EA/Nexon) illustrates how to succeed at making a prototype in 36 hours and demonstrate your utility in the game development process.

Ben Taylor has participated in dozens of game jams and hackathons including all of the Global Game Jams, Ludem Dare, and IGN’s game development reality show “The Next Game Boss”. Ben has worked with the game industry for more than a decade starting with Red Octane and most recently as a game engineer at Nexon Mobile in San Francisco. His most recently released game is the new adaptation of “SimCity” (2013) by EA Maxis.

12.
HOW TO BE A
PRACTITIONER?
S TA R T S M A L L .
Art:
• Can you make art suitable for a
game? (Sprites, 3D Assets, etc.)
• Can you contribute to a portion of
the artistic pipeline? (EX: “I can
texture and model 3D assets, but not
rig them”)
• Can you be the creator of all of the
artistic pipeline?
• Can you package your own assets
correctly?
• Can you incorporate your own
assets?

13.
HOW TO BE A
PRACTITIONER?
S TA R T S M A L L .
Art (continued):
• Can you script your own asset
interactions or effects using
tools?
• Can you write your own
tools?
• Can you code the game
yourself?
• Are you satisﬁed polishing
your abilities as an artist?

14.
GAME POST MORTEM #4
S A I LW I N G A G E N T
• VR Hang gliding Game created
in the 2nd round of CMU ETC’s
BVW Program in 2007.
• Created for a “Naive User”, in
that the user could only be
given instruction by the game
and be able to play with no
prior knowledge.

20.
GAME POST MORTEM #5
FRUITIX
• Created during the Pittsburgh XO
Game Jam in 48 hours.
• All new teammates.
• Created using PyGame to be
playable on SugarOS on any
OLPC, language agnostic.
• Win criteria: Preteen players’ vote

39.
GAME POST MORTEM #10
SIMCITY
• Features created in 48 hours
during an internal hackathon
on company time. (That’s right,
EA approved and paid for this)
• Objective: free reign to work
on that feature you always
wanted to prove out.

40.
USE JAMS AND HACKATHONS TO
EXPRESS AND IMPRESS WHERE YOU COULDN’T
O R D I N A R I LY I N Y O U R C U R R E N T W O R K E N V I R O N M E N T
Some of the best features in SimCity 2013 came out of this event

42.
GAME POST MORTEM #11
RANGE
• Created during the Rosetta Stone
Game Jam 2011
• Challenge was to incorporate the
concepts of "ink," "exploration" and
"layers" to create a game in 36 hours
or less.
• Personal Objective: get advice for a
language teaching game from the
most qualified people in the world.

43.
USE JAMS AND HACKATHONS TO
FOCUS ON YOUR OBJECTIVES, EVEN IF THEY
DIFFER FROM THOSE ADVERTISED BY THE EVENT